


Soft Place to Fall

by chemm80



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood Loss, Gen, Hurt Dean Winchester, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-23
Updated: 2012-08-23
Packaged: 2017-11-12 18:15:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/494220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chemm80/pseuds/chemm80
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Dean’s disgusted but not surprised that feeling better doesn’t actually result in him really…well, feeling better.</i>  Written for <a href="http://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?user=spn_rambleon"><img/></a><a href="http://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?user=spn_rambleon"><b>spn_rambleon</b></a> for the prompt "Blood loss has always made Dean restless. Sam has ways of keeping him still and warming him up."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soft Place to Fall

Dean, what are you doing?”

And just because Dean was expecting the question, this exact scenario, doesn’t make it any less irritating. He lets the lid of the washing machine fall shut hard enough to draw the baleful attention of the only other patron, an elderly lady standing as far across the sizeable laundry room from them as she can get. _Wash ‘n Dry_ , the sign out front helpfully announced. _No shit,_ Dean had thought.

“It’s called laundry, Sam. Maybe you’ve heard of it.”

Sam snorts.

“I’ve heard of it. What I haven’t heard of is you doing any of it without being threatened, bribed or losing a bet.”

“Fuck you. I do laundry.”

“Uh huh. You’re the only person I know who does laundry when he’s supposed to be taking it easy. Or you know… _healing_.” Sam emphasizes the last word sardonically. And rather unnecessarily, Dean thinks. He sighs.

“I’m fine,” Dean says tightly.

“Oh yeah, I can see that. That’s why you’re standing hunched over like you’re eighty,” Sam says, flicking a quick apologetic glance at the woman. “And why your face is the color of two-day-old oatmeal.”

“I am not…” Dean starts, but he trails off. His hands are starting to tingle and he realizes he can’t feel his legs at all. The roaring in his ears starts up quickly after, and…

Dean comes to, sprawled in one of the creaky plastic chairs, his face smashed against Sam’s chest. The old lady is saying something, but she might as well be speaking Swahili for all Dean can make sense of it. Sam says _No, no…he’s fine…he’s been sick_ and who knows what else, it’s just babble meant to reassure their observer and possibly Dean—maybe Sam himself—because Dean can feel Sam’s arms tighten around him, the way he’s practically radiating _Back off_ from his pores. He seems impossibly huge and if Dean lets himself be comforted by that for a few seconds, no one has to know.

Dean eventually pushes himself upright and Sam lets him, doesn’t speak, which is the only reason Dean can ignore the tight, angry set of Sam’s mouth, his frown of concern and the tension in his body language, all of which are telling Dean that he’s itching to reach out, touch Dean, steady him at the first sign of weakness.

_Weakness_. Goddamn, he hates this.

***

It was a huge warehouse in Milwaukee, ancient and rank-smelling, with too many dark corners and not enough exits. They’d killed the pair of ghouls that had laired up behind the stack of pallets in the back, and Dean hadn’t even realized he was hurt until he saw the stricken look on Sam’s face, the little wobble in the flashlight’s beam as Sam checked him over.

“Shit, Dean…” was the last thing he heard before everything went dark.

Dean woke up lying on the pavement beside the Impala, Sam hovering over him and swearing . Somehow that was the part that stuck in Dean’s mind, the way Sam was cursing God, their father and the son of a bitch who’d gotten to Dean loudly and in colorful detail. Sam almost never cursed. _Must be pretty bad_ Dean had thought vaguely, without much emotion.

“’M all wet,” he remembers saying, plucking at his soaked shirt. Then he’d realized.

“You’re all right…gonna be okay…” Sam was muttering, as he ripped Dean’s shirt open. Sam took in a sudden, sharp breath at whatever he saw and then started swearing again.

Dean smelled it then, the wet, metallic tang of blood. Lots of blood.

“Oh, hey, guess that’s me…’s my blood, huh, Sammy?” but it didn’t seem like a big deal.

He doesn’t remember if Sam answered him. Darkness fell.

***

They were two hundred miles away from the warehouse—with a quick detour by the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center's level I trauma center— when Sam finally felt safe enough to stop. He unloaded Dean in a skanky little motel at the edge of some sort of woodsy tourist trap of a town, practically deserted now in their off season.

Dean had been too out of it to care where they were, exhausted in spite of the fact that he’d spent most of the drive sleeping, only waking up long enough for Sam to force some kind of pills on him, washed down with as much Gatorade as Sam could get him to swallow. Dean hates to throw up worse than just about anything, and he’d managed to fight it for almost an hour before he made Sam pull over so he could puke it all up. He stood on the side of the road, heaving and spitting, breathing in huge gulps and near-sobs, so weak that the slipstream of passing trucks nearly bowled him over and Sam had to steady him, Dean bent in half with one of Sam’s arms under him, across his chest. He was too miserable and wrung out to do anything but lean into Sam’s support, and Sam was solid as an oak, never wavered. Dean was grateful.

Sam had given up after three cycles of this—swallow, hold everything down by force of will, puke it all back up anyway—until he finally settled for getting as much fluid into Dean as he could tolerate. The next morning he’d managed to drag Dean out to the local café. Dean was feeling a little better after a night in a real bed, but Sam didn’t look like he’d gotten much sleep.

“You look like shit,” Dean said.

“Thanks,” Sam said dully, lifting his eyes from the menu in his hand. He let it fall to the table like he didn’t have the energy to hold it up. Dean could relate, but he mustered up a smile for the waitress.

“Just coffee for me, sweetheart,” Dean said. His stomach still felt a little raw from all the exercise on the drive.

Sam’s brows drew together.

“Uh, can we have the steak and eggs, please? With the short stack, and some coffee for me, too,” Sam added.

Dean stared at him. Sam wasn’t generally a breakfast eater, but then maybe he hadn’t eaten in a while. Dean couldn’t really remember the last time they’d sat down to an actual meal, had anything more filling than a granola bar. Before he’d gotten hurt, for sure, so maybe Sam was just really hungry.

And Dean should know by now when Sam’s being sneaky, but hell, excuse him for being a little off his game when he’s running about two quarts low.

When the food came, Sam claimed the pancakes but he pushed the steak and eggs at Dean. Dean just raised an eyebrow at him.

“Eat it,” Sam ordered.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Dean said, knowing he sounded childish and not caring.

Sam rolled his eyes.

“I can’t believe I have to force you to eat,” Sam said; then his look hardened. “Dean, I’m too tired for your shit. We can’t get you a transfusion because of Henriksen and you can’t keep down the pills. You’re not going to get better unless you get some iron into your system. And since I know there’s no way you’re eating liver, or anything that could remotely be described as ‘leafy' or 'green'…”

“Oh, hell no…” Dean interjected.

“Exactly,” Sam continued. “So that means all the red meat and eggs you can eat. Go crazy.” Sam turned his attention to pouring about a gallon of syrup on his pancakes, but he was still frowning. At least that explained why Sam was so exhausted; he’d been researching treatments for blood loss all night. Awesome.

Dean still wasn’t hungry, but he turned his best grin on Sam. _Fake it til you make it._ He could do that.

“If you insist,” he said, and cut into his steak.

***

“Your brother is in no immediate danger, Mr. Smith,” Dean heard outside the door of the hospital room, the flat nasal sound of Wisconsin dripping from every syllable. “But he’s lost quite a lot of blood. We’d like to keep him for a few days for observation. He’d also benefit from a substantial transfusion, probably two or three units.”

“I understand. Thank you,” Sam said, and Dean had taken a deep breath that hurt his ribs and the row of fifteen stitches (he'd counted much later) spanning them. The bandage covering most of the right side of his forehead itched. He was reaching up to scratch it when Sam came through the door. Dean lowered his hand quickly and guiltily.

“We have to go,” Dean said.

“Dean, I…maybe we should stay, just long enough to get some blood back into you…”

“We have to go. Now,” Dean repeated.

Sam sighed and ran his hand through his hair, then nodded.

“I know.”

***

Dean’s disgusted but not surprised that feeling better doesn’t actually result in him really…well, feeling better. Three days after the diner incident and five (he thinks…the timeline is still a bit fuzzy for him and he’s not about to ask Sam about it) after the warehouse, Dean is not exactly ready to hit the road, much less hunt anything, but he’s dealing. He’s awake more now, mainly because he can’t really sleep, spends more time pretending to for Sam’s sake than actually doing it. He’s bruised and sore and all the lying around Sam expects him to do just makes him more stiff, achy and out of sorts. He feels almost feverish, except he isn’t, he knows, because Sam has dredged a thermometer up from somewhere and keeps making Dean let him check his temperature, using the really obvious threat of sticking it somewhere else to make Dean submit when he balks.

Sam says it’ll take him two or three months to really get his blood count back up to where it should be, but fuck that. He’s Dean Winchester, not some anemic housewife. He’ll be good to go in a week or two. And he needs to be—he’s already going stir crazy sitting around this crappy motel, watching shitty TV and pretending to sleep so that Sam will.

It’s become a routine over the last few weeks (two…three?...he doesn’t really know): getting up every couple of hours to drink his damned Gatorade just for something to do, and then getting up again an hour later to piss it out. It wakes Sam up every time, he’s positive. He’s sorry that it does, but he’d be worried if it didn’t, because it’d mean Sam was going soft and they can’t afford that right now, with Dean—he has to admit—off his game. It’s just damned irritating, all the way around.

Now it’s getting light outside, Dean can see through the shitty curtains, so he eases out of bed, his body stiff. Tossing and turning is tough to do quietly, especially with bruised ribs and a barely healed slice across them. He manages to get dressed, sort of, slipping into a single button-down shirt, dirty jeans and an old pair of flip-flops Sam keeps around. He inspects Sam carefully for a minute, decides he’s really asleep, and then ghosts out the door.

Mission: coffee.

He has no memory of what happened between the motel room door and the moment he realizes he’s sitting on the curb about halfway between their room and the office. He doesn’t think he really passed out ( _again_ …he hopes like fuck he didn’t) because he’s still upright and he doesn’t think you can actually do that. Sam is standing next to him in nothing but his underwear, which should really be amusing but Dean’s nauseated again and there’s no one to see Sam out here anyway, which obviously takes most of the fun out of it.

“What’re you doing, Dean?” Sam asks, for roughly the fortieth time this week.

“Just…” Dean starts, then has to clear his throat, swallow hard around the urge to retch. “You know, Sammy, can’t do my job, can’t do shit. Thought I’d head down to the local strip joint, see if I could pick some extra cash workin’ the pole.” Dean pauses, looks Sam pointedly up and down. “But hey, looks like you’ve got that covered.”

Sam huffs and startles a bit, like he’s just realized how little clothing he’s actually wearing, then rolls his eyes. For about the fiftieth time this week.

“And whose fault is that?” Sam asks rhetorically. All the starch seems to go out of him then, and he suddenly looks about ten years older than he is. He sinks down onto the curb beside Dean.

“Dean, come on. This has to stop. You’re up and down all night, wandering around everywhere, disappearing at random—you can’t get better like this. And I can’t take it much longer. Can’t you just goddamned _settle_?” And he sounds so tired, so frustrated, that fuck if Dean doesn’t think he may bust out crying any second.

Dean opens his mouth to speak, can’t think of a damned thing to say. He raises one hand, half shrugs, then lets his hand fall back to his thigh. He shakes his head.

Sam huffs a little humorless laugh.

“Yeah. I know.”

***

His first night after the hospital feels like an old half-faded dream to Dean, both in the way his recollection is fuzzy and because of how what happened didn’t seem that remarkable at the time but now seems completely implausible.

Dean remembers it being dark in the room, remembers being indescribably tired but only managing a miserable half-doze, hurting and shivering, too sore and cold to really fall asleep like he wants to but incapable of waking up. Or at least not until he felt Sam crawling into bed behind him.

“What…” Dean started to say, but then Sam curled around him, careful of the stitches as he pulled Dean back into his huge, warm—oh yeah…really fucking warm—body. Dean had groaned and the words had flown out of his mouth on an exhaled gasp, completely without his permission. “Oh goddamn, you feel good.”

Sam had sniffed and grunted, settled deeper into the mattress and Dean.

“Yeah, I get that a lot. Now go to sleep,” Sam had mumbled, then yawned and was out, Dean could tell from his breathing. Dean followed him almost as quickly.

***

Dean guesses it’s been couple of weeks since he got hurt, judging from the fact that Sam decided it was time to remove the stitches yesterday. Or maybe it was a couple of days ago, now, because Dean feels like he's showered at least a time or two since then. The wound itches like a mad bastard but it’s still too tender to scratch and Dean always hates this part. It’s like the itch from the healing cut somehow spreads underneath his skin to his entire body, causing his skin to crawl like he’s covered with bugs, making it impossible for him to sit still.

He’s grouchy and Sam’s bitchy and they’re going to kill each other if this keeps up. He’s barely sleeping at all, and Sam keeps grousing how it’s messing up his “healing”—fucking new age pansy-ass word if Dean’s ever heard one—and maybe they should just put each other out of their misery if this is what their lives have come to.

They’re both lying in their separate beds one night, neither sleeping, when Dean sighs and turns over one too many times, apparently, or something, because Sam sits straight up in his bed and announces, “All right, that’s it.” He gets up and starts pulling on his clothes, huffing around the room, gathering up other items of clothing, several of which he throws at Dean.

Dean gets up more slowly, frowns at Sam.

“What the fuck is going on? It’s…what…three am?”

“Just put your damned clothes on, Dean. We’re going for a ride.”

“What’s the problem? We getting kicked out of this place or something?” And it’s the first time Dean has even thought about money, about what they’ve been living on all this time. It shocks him that he’s been lying around for who knows how long while Sam took care of him. Sam’s an adult, sure, but Dean’s usually the one who deals with the day-to-day practical shit, not Sam. It’s disorienting, and he's gotten really sick and goddamned tired of that sensation already.

“No,” Sam says, calmer now. “I’ve got it covered. Don’t worry about the money. But we’re going for a ride. Get dressed, unless you want me to pick you up and haul you out to the car in your jammies.”

Dean snorts, but he’s pretty sure Sam can and will follow through on the threat and he’s not quite ready to physically fight Sam yet, so he obeys.

Sam drives and they ride in silence for a few minutes. Dean’s a little irritated at first, but the feeling gradually dissolves, until his chest is nearly aching with how good it feels to have the Impala rumbling under him, enclosing him in all that solid Detroit steel, her familiar smell and Sam’s reassuring presence beside him.

“I was thinking,” Sam rumbles softly. Dean gives him a sideways glance, but Sam’s eyes are on the road. “Remember that wendigo hunt back in ’95? You got clawed up pretty good then, too.”

Of course Dean remembers—he has the scars on his other flank, matched set to these newest ones. Sam doesn’t wait for his answer, already knowing it.

“You were all over the place, driving Dad nuts, bugging him to let you out of the house, let you go with him, wouldn’t settle.” Sam’s dimples flash briefly. “It got to the point where he wanted to dose you with whiskey to settle you down. I talked him out of it.”

“I never knew that.” Dean mumbles. “I’d have kicked your ass if I had,” Dean adds.

“I know it,” Sam says, breathes a short laugh. He pauses for a few seconds, like he’s remembering, then continues. “I was twelve. It was the first time you came home really hurt like that. Scared the shit out of me.”

Dean’s got nothing, has no idea where Sam is going with this or what he could say to that. He makes a noncommittal head motion and waits to see if Sam’s done with his little true confessions moment.

“I’d researched at the library the day you came home. Alcohol slows down wound healing. That’s why I stopped him.”

“May slow it down, but it sure makes the time pass faster,” Dean comments.

Sam grins tiredly.

“Yeah, probably. But Dad listened to me, for once, finally wound up just loading us all into the car one night when he couldn’t take it anymore. He drove for hours, going nowhere, but you slept like a baby the whole time.” Sam finally turns his head to look at Dean.

Dean eyes him incredulously for several seconds. Then he yawns, so long and wide that his jaw pops loudly. It cracks them both up and they laugh for a good minute before Dean settles back in his seat to just enjoy the ride for a while.

The road is lined with evergreens on both sides for as far as Dean can see, boring, but not as claustrophobia-inducing as he would have thought. Other than the even purr of the Impala’s engine, the car is silent and Dean suddenly realizes that’s true for the inside of his head, too. About goddamned time, he thinks, and rests his head against the doorframe, feeling drowsy and content for the first time in weeks.

Dean sleeps. Sam drives on.


End file.
